We have a house guest right now, a friend who needed a place to stay, and as a result I was trying to be extra quiet as I woke up this morning.

Until quiet became important, I hadn’t noticed how much laughter is involved in starting my day. My hilarious husband can be counted on to wake up in a great mood 9 times out of 10, and the more tired he is, the sillier. But it’s not even his adorable inability to complete sentences or tenacious desire to make jokes anyway. It’s just this overall sense of well-being, of being in my place.

This is where I’m supposed to be waking up. Right here. In this room. With this man. Great parts and hard parts and all of it.

“Being in my place,” is hard. My general tendency is to want to be in everyone else’s place. Curiously roaming from one experience to the other. Analyzing, deducing, imagining. Policing everyone else, at least in my head. I want to keep track of what’s going on for everyone in the room, both because it’s interesting and in case it will come to affect me.

But sometimes, often, I forget to be with my own experience. To be in my body, my heart, my world, my place.

It’s not a very sexy concept. Kind of like assigned seating in school, and I’ve long resisted the idea that being here, being me, is at all preferable to checking out what someone else is up to.

Why it’s worth it anyway

But it turns out, this is the way to ecstasy. Being in your body feels good. Like, really good. Stunningly good.

It’s also the way to a type of fulfillment a little bit deeper than that. Yeah things might be hard, or scary, or really annoying, but there’s an underlying sense of: “And this is where I need to be. These are my things.” Hard stops mattering so much. You grow a little bit more faith that things don’t actually go wrong, they just go how they need to. For you. In your place. Which is here.

Being in your place is about coming into your body. Reigning in some of the energy from the mental bodies of your third and sixth chakra and coming back to root, to heart, to presence. It’s what I try to teach with the Mindful Sexuality Blanket Fort and let me tell you, it is a pain-in-the-butt to explain.

Because I don’t know a thing about your place. Yes, I’m perceptive and intuitive. I usually know a lot of what’s going on with people based on little information. And if that’s coming from my heart, from my place, then I know exactly how to gift that to you. The right words or a look of compassion or a sigh or lots of space. And if it’s coming from my mind alone, or from a desire to “fix you,” then it won’t feel so wonderful or be nearly as helpful.

But ultimately, your place is, well, yours. Even when people can see where you need to go, it’s your job to get there.

So even though sometimes I have a pretty good idea of where people will get when then come deeper into their body, their own experiences, it’s still not my job to say it.

I can’t say if you’ll end up in a polyamorous marriage, like me, or if you’ll be celibate for the rest of your life, or if coming into your body won’t be much about sex at all and will instead take you to the perfect job, or a new house, or that friendship you didn’t know you needed until you found it.

This is what I can say:

Coming into your body, and into yourself, is hard. It’s ongoing. There’s always another level and there’s almost always resistance in some form or another. (Resistance is a BITCH.)

And there really isn’t anything else. There’s only are you here or are you not? Are you present or is there too much pain for the moment?

Get this: there is always another level. You don’t run out. There is always another way to shift the pattern. There is always more love, more light, more compassion, more completely unexpected surprises to come up.

(Like this: “I thought ‘being in my place’ was about discipline, but it’s actually about falling madly in love with myself. And I thought that would make me a spacey hippy, but it actually helps me stay more grounded and logical. Which doesn’t always sound so fun, but it turns out grounding and logic allow for days full of spontaneous joyful laughter…”)

Paradoxically, embracing more of your own uniqueness and specificity, even the really hard things, brings you closer to other people. Boundaries make for closer togetherness. The more you are with yourself the more you can be with others.

Most importantly:

You have it in you. You are the source for you. That doesn’t mean going it alone. It doesn’t mean you can’t ask for help (ask for all the help!). It means your place is the perfect fit for you. And when you take advantage of practices, beliefs, and ideas that can bring you to you…life just gets better. In exactly the right way. For you.

Which is what I hope for you. And if I can help you along the way, so much the better. But you don’t need me. You have you.